Socialism, a modern ideology that emerged from Marxist, Leninist, and neo-Marxist teachings, turned out to be one of the most powerful socio-political influences of the twentieth century. It has been defined as state control of the means of production and the distribution of wealth, and also as a transitional stage in the movement toward full-fledged communism. For more doctrinaire Marxists that stage is characterized by an end to the commodification of money, capital, and labor that is at the heart of capitalist market economies. Whatever its definition, socialism always involves some degree of a state-controlled economy and aims to ease or eradicate human exploitation.
It is precisely these anti-capitalist and
pro-liberation aspects of socialist thought
that appealed to many formerly colonized
people, whose lives and lands had oftenttimes
been brutally exploited by European or American capitalist powers. The promise of socialism, informed by various strains of Marxist thought, helped shape a “Third World ideology” that dominated the political imagination of revolutionaries in non-European countries during much of the twentieth century.
Purchase: Seasons Vol. 4, No. 1 | Autumn 2007
